Appendix B
The argument of my book is that the Iliad and Odyssey represent the usages and ideas of a prehistoric society. They are not the ideas and usages of proto-historic and historic Hellas, but of the Achaean invaders, or, at least, of the high-born men and women to whom Homer sang. On the other hand, Mr. Murray, if I succeed in understanding his position, holds that the ideas and usages of the Iliad and Odyssey are a kind of mosaic, the result of a long process of “expurgation of Homer.” If this view be correct, my whole argument, of course, is builded on the sand. Homer does not represent the ethical and religious beliefs and usages of a moment in the past.
It is therefore necessary to state, with textual citations as full as possible, Mr. Murray’s presentation of his case, given, first, in his Rise of the Greek Epic, and, later, in one of the Oxford Lectures by several authors, published in Anthropology and the Classics. Mr. Murray has very kindly assisted me by explaining points in which I was unable to follow his reasoning. But these explanations prove that we start from assumptions so opposed in their nature that community in conclusions is impossible. Perhaps even mutual intelligence cannot be perfect. Thus my reading of the Epics leads me to the conviction that they were composed in an age which knew nothing of coined money; an age when cattle were the standard of values:—this or that object was worth so many cows. But in Mr. Murray’s opinion this standard was preserved in the epics, after it was obsolete in practice, for reasons of stylistic convention. While I suppose our two epics to have been epics at a period very remote, when Achaean society was in its bloom; he holds that there were no epics till the Achaeans and the conquered peoples were intermingled. Earlier, there were only lays, and the silence of our epics as to coined money, for example, is a convention derived from the lays of a time when cows were the measure of value. Each of us, it seems to me, has to assume a kind of miracle. I have to think, and do think, that our epics were composed by a poet to amuse the leisure of an Achaean Court, and also that they were miraculously preserved, whether by writing or in memory, through several changeful centuries. I believe that this occurred because the poems are great harmonious structures, such as only a poet could produce; and because the many changes in society, costume, law, belief, and usage which the successive ages evolved, do not appear in the poems.
Mr. Murray, I think, has also to postulate another kind of miracle. Evolution, in some way which I do not understand, produced our epics out of a mass of floating poetical material. It appears that men are born to hold one view or the other, to believe in one or the other prodigy.
However, in the view which is not mine, stylistic conventions in the later poetry were based on a following of what was no convention in the older poetry, say as to the use of coined money or of cavalry. Now I know no other early national poetry, and no literary epics of the critical ages of Greek and Roman literature, where such convention is employed. Virgil was learned; Virgil knew Homer intimately; yet his Greeks and Trojans use iron weapons, not weapons of bronze; and the Roman buckler, not the Homeric shield.
To take another case, as soon as armorial bearings came into mediaeval Europe, the singers of the chansons de geste introduced them,—regardless of their absence in the earlier lays, which knew no such blazons. No convention of silence arose.
There is only one mention of writing in Homer. The Greek tragedians knew well that writing was, as far as Homer shows, very rare in the heroic age. But some of the heroes and heroines write whenever they have occasion. There is no archaistic convention. As I have shown in Homer and his Age, ancient poets and artists had, no more than Shakespeare, our modern habit of attending to “local colour” as historically known to us by research.
Perhaps it may be urged in reply, that early mediaeval epic poets were much less conservative than early Greeks. They altered, for example, the assonant laisses of the early chansons, and did them into rhyme, while Greece for epic purposes never deserted the hexameter. But I can give a fair parallel to the Greek non-observance of a convention in the Irish epic cycles.
The poets of the ancient Irish cycle of Fian ought, by the theory of convention, to have made their heroes use war-chariots like the heroes of the elder saga of Cuchullin. But they follow no such convention; their heroes ride or fight on foot, because such was the nature of war in their own later time.
The same reasoning applies throughout. I cannot believe that the makers of our epics, working in the early historic age, omitted mention of cavalry, coined money, periodical games, or anything else known to them, because they found no such matter in more ancient lays concerning and composed in a previous age. We have seen that the old “non-Homeric” epics were, as their fragments prove, full of non-Homeric usages. No “stylistic convention” forbade mention of these usages.
Thus no such stylistic convention—maintained in our Iliad and Odyssey, neglected in the Cypria, Aethiopis, and the rest—can be accepted. In fact, another and a special cause for many of Homer’s silences has to be suggested, as we shall see. Once more it is my assumption that our epics were made in the main as we have them, for a peculiar audience, a courtly and knightly audience, known to themselves and their poet as “Achaeans.” That they were of unmixed race I do not suppose; these Northern invaders, their chiefs at least, would marry the daughters of the princes of the land. But I assume that our epics were made for them, while they retained their Northern ideas; on many points very like the ideas, usages, and beliefs of the heathen Scandinavian settlers in Iceland. It is maintained by Mr. Murray that the ideas of “the conquered races” were very different, and that, as the two peoples mingled, the ideas of the conquered races re-emerged. This is manifestly true. But my view is that Achaean society, courtly society at least, had not adopted the beliefs and usages of the conquered races at the time when our epics, which ignore them, were composed. But these usages and ideas are usual in the fragments of the Cyclic epics on Trojan affairs. No stylistic convention interfered and kept them out. Mr. Murray has to discover a special cause for the presence in the “Cyclic” of much that is absent from our two epics.
The ideas of Mr. Murray, in some passages of his work, appear to be precisely the opposite of my own. In other passages we seem to be on the very point of agreement.
When we are told, in passages to be quoted, that there was in the formation of the Iliad, and to a less extent in that of the Odyssey, a strong element of reform and expurgation, we ask ourselves—who, in what age, and from what motives, were the reformers and purgers of what pre-existing poetic and legendary materials? Were those materials the property of the “Achaean or Northern” conquerors, or of the pre-existing “conquered races” (to use Mr. Murray’s terms); or were the materials a medley derived from both sources? Were the purgers Achaean poets working on materials, at least in part the property of the conquered races? Or was the purgation mainly done by Ionians, that is, by the mixed Greek peoples settled in Asia; peoples certainly retaining many of the ideas of the conquered races which our Homer ignores? Or did “the Achaean or Northern spirit” purge away some things distasteful to that spirit, while the Ionians purged away other things? What the elements more or less purged away are supposed to be, we shall see later. In the passage to which I have referred1 we find the following statements:—
“The epic tradition of Greece, vast and tangled in its wealth of varied beauty and ugliness, was left by the Homeric poets a much cleaner and colder thing than they found it. In the result, two influences were mainly at work. First, a general humanising of the imagination, the progress of a spirit which, as it loved beauty, hated cruelty and uncleanness. Secondly, a race prejudice. The relation of the Northern and the aboriginal elements in the Homeric poems are involved, when you come to details, in inextricable confusion, but in general the ‘Homeric’ tone of mind represents more of the Achaean or Northern spirit; the spirit of those scattered strong men who in their various settlements were leading and shaping the Aegean world. The special myths, beliefs, and rites that were characteristic of the conquered races are pruned away or ignored; the hero-worship, the oracles, the magic and witchcraft, the hocus-pocus of purification, all that savours of ‘the monstrous regiment of women, the uncanny prowess of dead men, and the baleful confusion between man and God.’
Here I should absolutely agree with Mr. Murray, if I were convinced that “the Northern or Achaean spirit” of Achaean poets was dealing mainly with “the epic tradition” of præ-Achaean Greece. If they were, they would certainly “ignore or prune away” manners and beliefs which were not their own. But I have shown, I think, that between Achaean and Athenian early “Saga” a great gulf was fixed in Homeric times. The Homeric poet dealt with Achaean legend, which could not contain ghost-worship, “hocus-pocus of purification,” and so on. Let me here remark that no known later Greek taste objected to the märchenhaft, the preposterous element in “Saga.” Pindar and the dramatists do not reject it, I have shown, but Homer does in the Iliad. Had Homer revelled in it, later Greek taste saw nothing out of keeping here; had no temptation to expurgate Pegasus, or the soul-box of Meleager, or the magical invulnerability of Achilles, or his medicinal spear, or that magical property, the Luck of Troy, the palladium, and so forth. The genius of Homer, not later expurgation, accounts for his reticence.
Next, I seem to discern that “the progress of a spirit which hated cruelty and uncleanness” refers to a period when “Achaeans” and “Pelasgians,” long intermingled, were becoming what is called “Hellenic,” the people of early historic Greece in the sixth century. What this Hellenic spirit might, if it could, purge away is just the ferocity which is not purged away; the ferocity which mutilates, and, when the deed is not executed, has threatened to mutilate foes slain in open fight; and which denies, or wishes to deny, honourable burial to the dead. On the dead “unseemly things” are wrought, with little or no rebuke from the poet, except in the case of the extreme ferocities of Achilles against Hector and the twelve Trojan captives. Thus Agamemnon “smote Hippolochus to earth, and cut off his arms and neck with the sword, then tossed him like a ball of stone to roll through the throng”; or rather “like the trunk of a tree.”2 In the same way the minor Aias cuts off the head of Imbrios, and throws it like a football “into the scrum.”3 Hector is keen to cut off the head of Patroclus, and stick it on a stake, like the head of the great Montrose.4 Peneleus decapitates Ilioneus, and waves the head at the Trojans.5
Manifestly these ferocities were de bonne guerre in the society to which Homer sang. I conceive that they were hateful to the taste of the historic Hellenic spirit. Could it have expurgated these ferocities it would have done so. But it could not. Other examples might be given. Thus Euphorbus,6 who dealt the first wound to Patroclus, threatens to cut off and carry home the head of Menelaus. Euphorbus was avenging his brother, slain by Menelaus. Peneleus was avenging Antimachus, his friend. The ferocities are sometimes prompted by personal vengeance. Euphorbus would have kept his word, but the spear of Menelaus pierced his throat. We cannot find expurgation in failure to accomplish a purpose. Hector meant to fix the head of Patroclus on a stake, so Iris tells Achilles,7 and to give his body to the dogs to devour. Such was warfare as known to Homer; and the intellect of later Greece, which probably abhorred such deeds, expurgated nothing.
Mr. Murray writes8 that “no other corpse” (except Hector’s) “is maltreated in the Iliad.” Such treatment was quite deliberately planned by men of both armies, and was also executed in hot blood. I have given examples enough of such maltreatment.
To cruelty we return, and to refusal of burial. It seems to have been quite usual. The notable exception in clemency is Achilles; before his passion came on him he ransomed his captives, and “his soul had shame to despoil the dead Eëtion”; but he burned him in his inlaid armour, and raised a barrow over him.9
In the Iliad ferocity runs high, in these particulars; the historic hatred of such doings is growing but slowly. “The spirit that hated cruelty” has left the facts where it found them; there is no expurgation of them. As to the Hellenic historic spirit and its hatred of “uncleanness”—autres temps, autres moeurs! Homer has no allusions to the survival of savage vices detested by “the Northern spirit.” But, granting that the waxing spirit of Hellenism expurgated atrocities committed on the dead (though they stand staring upon us in the Iliad), “the Northern or Achaean spirit” is credited by Mr. Murray with “pruning away or ignoring” the characteristic rites, beliefs, and usages of the conquered races.
The earlier the period, the more drastic would be the purification. Achaeans, not yet leavened with “Pelasgian” blood and beliefs, could not celebrate what they confessedly did not practise. In their work no later expurgation could cleanse away that which their work could not contain.
Hero-worship; propitiation of the dead; purification of homicides by blood; initiatory ceremonies, mysteries, witchcraft, and so forth, these are practices with which we are familiar in savagery, in barbarism, and, by way of survival, in the rites and customs of the most highly civilised races. They exist in various degrees in different races and societies. In Northern society, as we know it in the sagas, most of these superstitions are comparatively rare. Ghosts were believed in by Gunnar and Grettir; very able-bodied ghosts they were, a kind of vampires. But they were not propitiated, they were met with the steel axe and short sword, or with muscular force in the wrestling match. Their bodies were mutilated and then burned, as in the case of the vampire Glam in the Grettir saga.
There are few, if any, traces of hero-worship in early Teutonic and Scandinavian literature. Of purification from homicide in baths or by aspersions of swine’s blood I can remember no Northern example.
The original purpose of this nasty practice is, apparently, to throw the pursuing ghost of the slain man off the trail of the slayer; but the heroes of the Icelandic sagas recked not a fig for the feud of the ghost. “Soul and body, on the whole, are odds against a disembodied soul,” in their opinion, hence the absence of the Greek rite of purification by blood.
The Northerners had, doubtless, their various rustic rites and revels, originally intended to promote the fertility of nature. But if they once had initiatory ceremonies and mysteries like savages, these appear to have been forgotten by the time of the heroes of the Icelandic sagas. Witchcraft was an article of belief, but was held in great disesteem. There are legends of sacrifices of kings, but these are somewhat shadowy and remote.
As a consequence, if the Teutonic and Scandinavian people had possessed a great epic poet, working in accordance with the ideas of his people as they existed at the time of the occupation of Iceland, his poem would, I conceive, be as silent as the Homeric epics about hero-worship, ghost-feeding, purification of homicides by blood, sacrifices of girls, initiatory ceremonies, and mysteries like those of Demeter and Dionysus. Of second-sight we would hear, as we do in the Odyssey. The magic would be worked by mortals, not by a fair goddess, Circe. Ravening monsters like Grendel and his mother, in Beowulf, with their refraction in the Grettir saga, and vampires like Glam, would afford sport to the heroes; whereas in the Iliad we have only the Chimaera to represent such monsters, and the Chimaera is alluded to but slightly.
Thus, as regards the whole chapter of the superstitions “characteristic of the conquered races” in Greece10 (and characteristic of the historical Hellenes and of Athens in her lustre), the supposed Scandinavian epic would be as pure as the Iliad. The absence of mention of hero-worship, ghost-propitiation, divinised mortals, purification by blood, sacrifices of girls, initiations and mysteries, would be quite natural and unaffected.
The poet could not speak of beliefs and rites which were not in the manners of his people. In the same way, and for the same reason, Homer scarcely hints at anything in this chapter of superstitions and usages. Like the Scandinavians of the heroic age, his people had not these things in their manners.
As the oldest Achaean poetry must necessarily have been pure from the usages and beliefs of the conquered races, as the Achaean or Northern spirit ignored what, according to Mr. Murray, it actually persecuted,11 we need not attribute this ignoring of such beliefs and practices to expurgation in a later age. The Ionians, as soon as we meet them in the dawn of actual history and in the “Cyclic” poems, are believers in ghosts, worshippers of heroes, and they practise purification by blood. People do not expurgate from older poetry the things consecrated by their own law and religion and celebrated in their own poems: things which could not be present, too, in the old poems of the uncontaminated Achaeans. Yet Mr. Murray appears, if I understand him, to incline to a theory that hero-worship, for example, was distasteful to the Ionian cult of the Delian Apollo, and perhaps for that reason was, in early historic times, expurgated from the Iliad. But certainly, given Homeric ideas about the dead, who could not help or hinder, hero-worship did not and could not exist in Homeric society and poetry. Moreover, if the Achaean spirit did “prune away or ignore” such ghostly matters, the Delian expurgators could find nothing here to expurgate. As to blood-purification, Apollo himself was purified, and, in art, holds the purifying pig above the homicide. So purification was “Apolline,” and what was Apolline was safe from Apolline expurgation.
I now collect passages on the expurgators from Mr. Murray’s writings.
Expurgation
“The middle and later generations of the Homeric poets... were mainly responsible for the work of expurgation.”
“Homer has cut out” certain stories of human sacrifice, cannibalism, and “mutilations of the Hesiodic gods” “for their revoltingness” (p. 122).
“Homer, if we may use that name to denote the authors of the prevailing tone of the Iliad” (p. 131).
So far the “expurgations” appear to have been done mainly by the Homeric poets themselves “in the middle and later generations.” Yet, as to superstitions, the first uncontaminated Achaean poets must have been the purest of all.
It is admitted that the poets did not in the same way “expurgate” the “Cyclic” epics.
“If the educational use of the Iliad began in Ionia as early as the eighth century, which is likely enough, we can hardly help supposing that it had some share in these processes of purification with which we have been dealing” (p. 133).
Here it appears that, probably by the eighth century, the Iliad was a distinct poem, recognised as such, and subject to processes of purification from which the Cypria, for example, and other “Cyclic” poems escaped.
“The Epos” has “its prevailing Achaean tone,” owing to “the prestige of the Achaean chiefs, the convenience of the Achaean institutions of the Saga and the Bard,” and “the partial return to the migratory life” (p. 245). If, then, it is really the austerity, and freedom from low superstitions, of the conquering Achaean race that our epics represent, the “Cyclic” poems, if equally old, should be equally austere, and equally free from superstition. But they, notoriously, were full of the superstitions of the conquered races. Why did the middle generations of Homeric poems leave them alone? Because already selected for recitation?
If the Achaean or Northern spirit, “the clean and lordly Northern spirit,” made our epics so pure, what was left for the spirit of historic Greece (by no means Northern, or specially clean or lordly) to do in the way of purification?
It is plain enough that the clean and lordly Northern people became mixed with the pre-existing populations in Greece, like the Normans and the Cromwellian English settlers with the Irish. “As the population became more mixed, which was the case everywhere on the mainland, the result was that the old pre-Hellenic stratum of beliefs and emotion, re-emerged” (p. 246), for example, in worship of the dead, which is un-Homeric and un-Achaean.
Are we to suppose, then, that while the Achaeans were sinking to the pre-Hellenic level in such matters, all the superstitions of the conquered races found their way into the Homeric poems, and had to be purged out again, in Delos, or at Athens, where these superstitions were in full force? If so, the descendants of the pre-Hellenic populations inserted the superstitions into the Iliad where they had not been previously, and then cut them out again.
It is not easy to understand how stories “far too primitive and monstrous for Homer” “had been expurgated from Homer centuries back” (p. 247), centuries before Aeschylus, who introduced Io, once the mistress of Zeus, later a cow, in his Prometheus. If Homer or the Homeric poets were clean and lordly Achaeans, they never would have dealt at all in a story “far too primitive and monstrous for Homer,” or for any one but Major Weir. It does not appear to me that this theory of expurgation, all important as it is, can be easily understood. If later Greece expurgated the Homeric ferocities to the dead, why are they left standing? If the Achaean spirit got rid of the superstitions, why need we invoke later influences, Delian, Ionian, Athenian?
Then the old questions re-arise, why were the “Cyclic” poems of the heroic times left unexpurgated; why is the Attic drama tinged with what is too monstrous for Homer, if Homer was purged a generation, or two or three, earlier than the generation of Aeschylus? To account for the expurgations, we are to consider the establishment by law of Homeric recitations at Athens (see “The Alleged Athenian Recension of Homer”). Concerning the date of this event, and everything else connected with it, all is vague. Mr. Murray writes: “The recitation was established about the end of the sixth century... so much seems historically clear.” (I wish anything were historically clear in this business!) “It matters little that, in attributing the institution of this recitation to a definite founder, our authorities waver between three almost contemporaneous names, Solon, Pisistratus, Hipparchus. Whichever it was, the main fact remains the same. General considerations tell somewhat against Solon, and in favour of the tyrants.” Now, as our authorities, all late, differ totally as to the name (and so, as to the date) of the man who instituted the recitations of Homer, it is plain that they had no good authority. “The Solonian laws and constitution were promulgated in 594 B.C.,” says Grote; that was at least eighty years before a date “about the end of the sixth century.” The men are far from being contemporaneous. Hipparchus was murdered in 514, in the thirteenth year of the tyranny of Hipparchus, and Hippias, if anybody, not Hipparchus, should have made a law regulating Homeric recitations.
All is vague; but if Thucydides correctly says that Hipparchus was slain in consequence of a quarrel arising out of an odious non-Homeric vice; and if, as Thucydides says, Aristogeiton died “not easily,” if he was tortured to death, as later authors tell, then the society of Athens was little likely to expurgate either uncleanness or cruelty, if they found such matter in Homer.
Political and personal history being so vague and dim in the sixth century, literary history cannot be in better case; practically we know nothing beyond the fact that a law regulated the recitation of Homer at the Panathenaic festival.
How these recitations and hypothetical earlier Ionian recitations contributed to the expurgation of the Iliad and Odyssey, must be stated in Mr. Murray’s own words. I may first observe that, in his opinion, “the body of the poem” (the Iliad), “even in the latest parts, is clearly Ionian; the ultimate nucleus something else, something older and more Northern.”12 How, if this be true, the Ionians are only once named in the poems, while the Athenians are but perfunctorily mentioned, is what always puzzles me!
A long extract in which Mr. Murray gives his views must now be quoted:
“In the remains of the earliest Greek poetry we are met by a striking contrast. As Mr. Lang has told us, ‘Homer presents to the anthropologist the spectacle of a society which will have nothing to do with anthropology.’ By Homer, of course, Mr. Lang means the Iliad and the Odyssey; and we may add to those poems a stream of heroic tradition which runs more or less clearly through most of our later literature, and whose spirit is what we call classic, Homeric, or Olympian.
“But there is also in the earliest epic tradition another stratum, of which this Olympian character does not hold. A stratum full of the remains, and at times even betraying the actuality, of those ‘beastly devices of the heathen’ which are dear to the heart of us anthropologists—if a mere Greek scholar may venture to class himself among even amateur anthropologists; ceremonies of magic and purification, beast-worship, stone-xvorship, ghosts, and anthropomorphic (theriomorphic?) gods, traces of the peculiar powers of women both as ‘good medicine’ and as titular heads of the family, and especially a most pervading and almost ubiquitous memory of Human Sacrifice.
“This stratum is represented by Hesiod and the Rejected Epics,—I mean those products of the primitive saga-poetry which were not selected for recitation at the Panathenaea (or the unknown Ionian archetype of the Panathenaea), and which consequently fell into neglect,—by the Orphic literature, by a large element in tragedy, most richly, perhaps, by the antiquarian traditions preserved in Pausanias, and in the hostile comments of certain Christian writers, such as Clement and Eusebius.
“Now the first thing for the historian to observe about this non-Homeric stratum is this: that non-Homeric is by no means the same thing as post-Homeric. We used to be taught that it was. We used to be taught that Homer was, practically speaking, primitive: that we started from a pure epic atmosphere and then passed into an age of romantic degradation. The extant remains of the non-Homeric poems frequently show in their form, and sometimes even in their content, definite signs of presupposing the Iliad, just as the Iliad here and there shows signs of presupposing them; and it is not until recently that we have been able to understand properly the nature and the method of composition of an ancient Traditional Book. I will not go into that point in detail here. Even supposing that the Cypria, as a poem, could definitely be called ‘later’ than the Iliad, it is enough to say that a later literary whole may often contain an older kernel or a more primitive mass of material, and in the case of the non-Homeric saga-poems it is fairly clear that they do so.
“Two arguments will suffice: First, the argument from analogy. Few anthropologists, with the knowledge now at our command, will regard the high, austere, knightly atmosphere of the Iliad as primitive when compared with that of Hesiod. In the second place, a great proportion of our anthropological material is already to be found in prehistoric Crete. The an-iconic worship, the stones, the beasts, the pillars, and the ouranian birds; the great mother goddess of Anatolia, the human sacrifices, and the royal and divine bull. I speak under correction from those who know the Cretan finds better than I; but to me it seems that there are many bridges visible from Crete to Hesiod or Eumelus or even Pausanias; but the gulf between Crete and Homer seems, in certain places, to have no bridge.
“Thus the later literary whole contains the more primitive modes of thought, the earlier religion.
“Now this fact in itself, though it may be stated in different ways, is not much disputed among scholars. But the explanations of the fact are various. That which seems to me much the most probable is the theory of Expurgation. As Mr. Lang seems not quite to have understood what I tried to say about this in my Rise of the Greek Epic, I will restate it in this way: We know that the great mass of saga-poetry began to be left on one side and neglected from about the eighth century on; and we find, to judge from our fragments, that it remained in its semi-savage state. Two poems, on the contrary, were selected at some early time for public recitation at the solemn four-yearly meeting of “all Ionians,”13 and afterwards of “all Athenians.” The poems were demonstrably still in a fluid condition; and the intellect of Greece was focussed upon them. This process lasted on through the period of that great movement which raised the shores of the Aegean from a land of semi-savages to the Hellas of Thales, of Aeschylus, and of Euripides. And we find, naturally, that amid all the colour of an ideal past, in which these two epics, like all other epics, have steeped their story, there has been a gradual but drastic rejection of all the uglier and uncleaner elements. That is a very broad statement; it omits both the evidence and the additional causes and qualifications. But it serves to explain why I treat the non-Homeric sagas as representing more faithfully the primitive pre-Hellenic habits of thought, the mere slough out of which Hellas rose.”
I agree that the “non-Homeric sagas” represent more faithfully the primitive pre-Hellenic habits of thought. Homer was not concerned with pre-Hellenic habits of thought; he represents the Hellenes who “possessed Hellas, the land of fair women, and followed Achilles.”
I also entirely agree that “the later literary whole” (by which I at least mean Hesiod, the “Cyclic” fragment, and much of Greek tragedy, not to speak of antiquarian learning) “contains the more primitive modes of thought, the earlier religion.” But the theory that these things were once in, but were purged out of, the Iliad and Odyssey, still baffles me. If they were usages peculiar to the conquered races, how could they appear in the poetry of the uncontaminated Northern or Achaean conquerors?
How, again, can we say that “the great mass of saga poetry began to be left on one side and neglected from about the eighth century”? Notoriously the “Cyclic” poems, or the legends which were given in those poems, were greatly preferred as subjects of art by the Athenian vase-painters of the sixth century, and by Polygnotus when he decorated the Lesche at Delphi. The stories, I have shown, reached the Middle Ages through Rome and through Graeco-Roman literature, and eclipsed our Homer. To them we owe the unhappy Troilus and Cressida of Shakespeare.
We have no evidence known to me that proves the selection, “at some early time for public recitation,” of “two poems,” at the solemn four-yearly meeting of “All Ionians” and afterwards of “all Athenians.” Mr. Verrall supposes the “Cyclic” poems, as well as our Homer, to have been recited at the Panathenaea. I know no evidence that they were, and none proving that they were not. I am unaware of any reason for which our Iliad should have been specially selected for education in the Ionia of the eighth century, and for public recitation. The reason is the further to seek if the Iliad and Odyssey, when thus selected, “were demonstrably still in a fluid condition”; indeed, while they were still in a fluid condition, I do not know how they could have been deemed so much more choiceworthy than other poems still (I presume) fluidic.
If “the intellect of Greece was focussed upon” Iliad and Odyssey while they were still fluidic, but already selected, then the expurgation was due, not to Achaean poets who ignored and pruned away the usages and beliefs of the conquered races, but to les intellectuels of Greece, who (whatever their private opinions might be) saw hero-worship in daily practice; and if they killed any one, were purified by pigs’ blood. Hesiod stood high in universal knowledge, was a consecrated authority; if he could be purged, why was he not purged? Because he was not recited? Yet he was part of education, and needed a Bowdler much more than Homer.
The practices and beliefs expurgated from Homer were not “done in a corner” in historic Greece.
So “primitive,” so barbaric was the intellect of historic Greece even in the sixth century and in the age of Pericles, and later, in regard to heroic tombs, for example, that the heroic ghosts were supposed to inhabit their sepulchres in the shape of rather harmless snakes, like the Idhlozi of the Zulus. “In Snake form the hero dwelt in his tomb,” says Miss Harrison.14
Miss Harrison publishes reproductions of works of Greek art from the sixth century (when all ugly things of this kind, we are told, were drastically rejected from the Odyssey and Iliad) to the fourth century. We see the dead, a male and a female ghost, receiving offerings. The artist is determined to make his meaning clear. Behind the chairs of the holy heroes is a huge snake with a man’s beard. He is a human snake, the incarnation of the dead man’s ghost. This is the belief of the Baronga of Delagoa and of the Zulus.15
In a vase, a lecythus, of the fifth century, the worshippers surround a tumulus with a phallus-shaped pillar on top. A huge snake occupies the tumulus; he is the ghost’s incarnation.16
Not in glens of mountainous Arcadia, or in recesses of rural chapels alone, were these things done. The theatre showed sacred tombs; each place of periodical games had its presiding hero; relics were in high request, living men, conquerors or athletes, came to be divinised; at the Eleusinia the initiates saw rites of savage origin; oracles of the dead were publicly consulted; the purification rites went on as law demanded—all publicly, all unrebuked.
Does any one suppose that priapic images like those of the Admiralty Islands were features in Homer’s conception of a street in Mycenae or Ilios? These images were sacred in the Athens of Pericles, the Hermae were not like Homer’s Hermes. Is it likely that, if the managers of Delian or Athenian recitations found such things as these in Homer, they would cut them out as too naughty to be mentioned, or for some other reason not to be mentioned, at a public festival of men and women familiar with all these things, and seeing in them nothing but good?
It seems unlikely. Moreover, if the Northern or Achaean spirit had ignored or pruned away these things, they could give no trouble to the managers of Delian or Athenian recitations.
When we come to consider examples of expurgation, we may prefer to pass by the odious vices reprobated by the code of Australian savages, but highly popular in historic Greece. They do not occur in our Homer, and I know but one allusion to them in the Icelandic sagas, and that is in a mere impossible taunt about a Bogle. But no one can say that Homer never heard of such things; we might as well say that, because nobody coughs in Homer, no Achaean ever condescended to cough. The profession of Rahab cannot have been unknown, though Homer never mentions it. In short, a high ideal tone is preserved, Homer is not Monsieur Zola; an epic is not a “naturalistic” novel.
When the Greeks did entertain a moral objection to anything, to adelphic marriage, for example: if Homer mentioned such an union, among the Phaeacians, I can easily believe that a palliative explanation might be later inserted. Thus, in Odyssey, vii. 54, Alcinous and Arete are “of the self-same parents.” Later, a genealogy makes them uncle and niece. This, for what I know, may be a later palliative interpolation. But it is all one to Homer. He follows a well-known Märchen, a tale of No Man’s Land, as in his mention of the adelphic marriages of the sons and daughters of Aeolus. Adelphic unions are capital offences in savage customary law; one has no reason to suppose that the Homeric Achaeans were more lax than savages, or no less depraved by Egyptian influences than the Ptolemy and Berenice of Theocritus.17
I am following Mr. Murray’s examples of expurgation. The spirit of the battles in the Iliad “is chivalrous,” he says. “No enemy is ever tortured” (as Sinon is in Quintus Smyrnaeus). Yet mediæval professors of chivalry never mutilated, I think, foes (not being rebels) slain in fair field. Homer’s men did, I have shown; and nobody expurgated the melancholy facts. As to cruelty to living foes, Euripides and Sophocles make Achilles drag the living Hector behind his chariot, while Homer makes it plain that Hector is stone dead.18
One can only say that Homer shows better taste than the tragedians. If this good taste is due to late expurgators, if, in a Homeric lay, Achilles did drag the living Hector, one can only wish that Sophocles and Euripides had been on the moral level of the expurgators. Whoever they were, their taste was vastly superior to that of the tragedians. I would attribute the better taste to Homer. The odious tale may be of Ionian invention: the Ionian poet makes Odysseus a child murderer. In the Tain Bo Cualgne, Ferdiad drags a very odious dead man at his chariot wheels, not a living man. Homer was probably, indeed certainly, on a higher level of taste than the ancient Irish epic-makers: on this point they are at one with him. The great tragedians preferred a more horrible story—not, of course, because they approved of such proceedings. In King Lear, Shakespeare has horrors undreamed of in his sources, in Märchen and chronicles. He followed a French story in Sidney’s Arcadia, and pleased “the groundlings.” To “groundlings” Homer did not sing: Sophocles and Euripides wrote for the cultured Pit of Athens. For that reason, or because they found their story in some unknown source, and liked the horrible, they made Achilles torture a living enemy.
There is a passage in the Iliad (xiii. 573) in which a man, speared from behind through the bowels, “where a wound is most baneful to wretched mortals, writhes about the spear... for a moment, not for long”; his life follows the spear withdrawn. This is not a pleasant picture; but war, in fact, is not pleasant. Mr. Murray conceives the line which he renders “he struggled quite a little while, not at all long,” to be a later palliative or expurgative addition; like the same formula in Odyssey, xxii. 473, where it is applied to the dying struggles of the hanged women-servants of Odysseus. This may be so, or may not; the fact that the line is a formula, like those of our ballads, makes me incline to think it ancient. The point is not of much importance, and cannot be decided. The horrible death inflicted on the treacherous thrall, Melanthius, in the Odyssey, is a proof that Homer’s men could be very cruel to a treacherous thrall; but so could the Norsemen be, as in the scarcely quotable parallel case of Wolf the Unwashed. In the sagas generally we hear of few such cases, though many must have occurred, abroad, in Viking raids. In the Iliad there is no treacherous thrall; if such an one there were, he would have been treated like Melanthius.
I understand Mr. Murray to argue that the Iliad has been expurgated, but not quite successfully, of traces of poisoned arrows; while the Odyssey (l. 257-264) has the story of Odysseus seeking for arrow-poison at Ephyre, where poison was, we elsewhere learn, a marketable commodity. Ilus would not give it, for he feared the gods; another man gave it, as he dearly loved Odysseus. The story is not a true story, but a fable told by Athene. All it proves is that arrow-poison was known, but was hateful to the gods. As to Mr. Murray’s arguments that such words as ἄφυκτος, not “to be escaped,” applied to arrows in the Iliad, and “bitter” (πικρός) and “groanful” and “not long to be supported” as proofs of the practice of poisoning arrows, I can only say that I do not think the inference necessary. Πικρός means “sharp,” according to Liddell and Scott; unpoisoned arrows cause groans enough; the heroes “do not long support” flesh-wounds from spears, but “retire hurt.” That Agamemnon expects Menelaus to die (iv. 134) when arrow—smitten in the belly, is very natural. Menelaus would have died had the arrow bitten deep, but it merely grazed him through several interstices of his armour. Pandarus shot with a fresh arrow, “unused before,” “whose poison has not been rubbed off.” I reply that in meditating an important shot, any archer would use a fresh arrow if he could, because the feathers would have been in better trim and the shaft unstrained, the point unblunted, exactly as a man would use a new spear in a tournament.
In the Iliad, men have strong bows, with iron or bronze points. People with these advantages do not use arrow-poison, the resort of races with blow-pipes, or with weak bows and arrow-points of bone, corrupt human bones by preference.
As to human sacrifice, a frequent topic in the Cyclic poems and the Greek dramatists, I have treated the subject elsewhere. I do not think that it was expurgated from the Iliad by men who let it stand in the Cyclic poems and the drama, but that it was not in Achaean manners. In the legends told of human sacrifice by Pausanias, the peoples concerned are usually Ionian or Athenian. The timid Calchas of Iliad, i. 74-83, who dare not name the cause of Apollo’s wrath unless Achilles will guarantee his safety, could never have bidden Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter Iphigeneia, who is not one of the Over Lord’s three daughters, in the Iliad.
Mr. Murray suspects that stories of sacrifices of maidens “would have been rejected from the Iliad, not only because human sacrifice was a barbarity, but also because the stories involved too intense an interest in women.”19 As I am intensely interested in Helen, Hecuba and Andromache, in the Iliad, the argument seems to me strange. As to Mr. Murray’s theory that the Cretan king was done to death at stated intervals,20 the topic cannot be treated satisfactorily here. I do not believe that anything of the sort described occurred anywhere, and I am surprised at the remark, “We have no tradition of Minos’s death.”21
The Minyan story of the intended sacrifice of Phryxus and Helle is a world-wide Märchen, with sacrifice substituted for endophagous cannibalism.
Finally, I do not suppose that the ferocities of Achilles towards Hector, and at the funeral of Patroclus, are an expurgated version of a lay in which they were narrated with pride and pleasure.22 It was customary, in Homeric warfare, to maltreat the dead; but Achilles went too far, and persevered too long. He is, as Mr. Murray says, “a man mad with grief, a man starving and sleepless,” a man who knows that Hector intended to mutilate his friend and give his body to the dogs. But these excuses do not palliate the perseverance of Achilles in outrage, or his slaying of the twelve Trojan captives. Sacrificed they were not. There was no ritual for such a slaughter, ‘and, as a matter of fact, it is crowded into a shamefaced line and a half.’ You would expect this sacrifice to have at the very least twenty.”23
You might expect that, if you believed that the Achaeans had a ritual for human sacrifice! If they had, which I deem inconceivable, we may readily believe that the spirit of historic Hellas would have expurgated eighteen and a half of the twenty lines.
Much of this theory of expurgation of the Iliad and Odyssey seems to me to rest on the assumption of εὐφημία. This means abstention from ill-omened words in poems recited at a great public festival. It is impossible for me to understand why words referring, for example, to the habitual and legal purification of homicides, or to the established cult of heroes, should be deemed “ill-omened” at the recitations, in no way religious, at a public holiday, and yet be deemed “well-omened” in the performances of Athenian tragedy.
If the superstitions of the conquered races were not those of the conquerors, they could not be in the epics of the conquerors. If they were not there, les intellectuels of Athens could not expurgate them.
Notes
1 R. G. E. p. 134.
2 Iliad, xi. 145-147.
3 xiii. 202-204.
4 xviii. 176-177.
5 xiv. 496-505.
6 xvii. 39.
7 xviii. 175-177, xvii. 126.
8 R. G. E. p. 131.
9 Iliad, vi. 416-419.
10 R. G. E. p. 134.
11 R. G. E. pp. 245-246.
12 R. G. E. p. 173.
13 This archetype, Mr. Murray has just said, is “unknown.”
14 Prolegg. to Study of Greek Religion, 1903, p. 329.
15 Ibid. pp. 327, 328.
16 Ibid. p. 329.
17 R. G. E. pp. 116, 117.
18 Ajax, 1031. Andromache, 399.
19 R. G. E. p. 123.
20 Ibid. p. 127.
21 See Roscher’s Lexikon, s.v. Minos.
22 R. G. E. pp. 130, 131.
23 R. G. E. p. 131.